Auburn-Gresham residents take back their community block by block

From The Windy Citizen:

Crime began trickling into Auburn-Gresham during the mid-1970s, according to Max Newsome, who has owned a dentist office on West 79th Street since 1967.

The neighborhood began to change.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Catholic Church located at 1210 W. 78th Place explains:

“When the community went from a primarily white community to a primarily African-American community in the 1960s, not only did ‘white flight’ take place, businesses and economic stability left the neighborhood,” he said.

African-Americans started moving out of Chicago’s overly cramped Black Belt and into Auburn-Gresham after the Civil Rights movement formally ended segregation.

Only 0.2 percent of Auburn-Gresham’s residents were African-American in 1960. But by 1970, 69 percent of its residents were African-American, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

The transition had a tremendous effect on the neighborhood.

Racist anxieties caused many whites to leave the community. Strong establishments such as department stores, bakeries, funeral homes and theaters left with them, Pfleger said.

Property values dropped.

“People invest[ed] their whole life savings into houses and apartment buildings that were suddenly worth less overnight,” Pfleger said. “All of the sudden, schools became less quality, city services became less quality – economic base was evaporated literally overnight.”

The community was deserted; crime increased.

The increase in crime caused many young residents to flee the neighborhood. Few residents, who refused to leave their homes, were left behind.

“When that starts to happen, you don’t see consistent growth,” Pfleger said. “And the community starts to die.”

Auburn-Gresham’s former Ald. Terry Peterson (17th), who went to high school in Englewood, remembers how the neighborhood began to change.

“When I saw the community really go down was when McDonald’s moved out,” Peterson said. “79th Street was a street to be avoided. You just didn’t want to take 79th Street east or west because of the amount of violence.”

The number of young people who died from violence during the mid-1990s shocked Peterson, who became alderman in 1996.

Drive along west 79th Street past Halsted thru to about Ashland. It's looking a lot better perhaps the street scape is almost comparable to what you might find on the north side.

Read the whole thing.

ADDITION: Get a load of this quote!

“It’s very refreshing when you go into a community meeting and they’re asking me to try to figure out how to get a Nordstrom’s on 79th Street. Fifteen years ago, I don’t think that they would have thought that they could have got some of the things that we got,” said current Ald. Latasha Thomas (17th).

Heh, I gotta admire that kind of thinking!